Some politicians are absorbing the Ruth Bader Ginsburg lesson not to lose a valuable seat by clinging to it too long.

We do not know yet what the political environment will look like for Senate races in 2026, but we got another sign with this morning’s announcement by New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen that she will not seek reelection. If you’re keeping score at home, there will now be three Democratic seats opened by retirements in light-blue states (Shaheen follows Michigan’s Gary Peters and Minnesota’s Tina Smith out the door), plus one Republican seat in a deep-red state (with Mitch McConnell retiring in Kentucky) and two appointed Republicans (John Husted in Ohio and Ashley Moody in Florida, the replacements for JD Vance and Marco Rubio) facing the voters for the first time. The most vulnerable incumbents (Republican Susan Collins in Maine, Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Republican Thom Tillis in North Carolina) all appear to be running again, and Brian Kemp is inching closer to launching a challenge to Ossoff.

McConnell is quitting because he’s 83 and clearly not in the best of health. Shaheen, at 78, is reaching a normal retirement age, but is plainly still capable of running for one more term. The traditional conventional wisdom would be that the retirements of Shaheen, Smith (age 67), and Peters (age 66) would be that they see tough campaigns ahead to hold their seats, and are bailing out. While Chris Sununu does not seem to be running for the Senate, a Sununu entry into the race would make Shaheen’s seat much more challenging to hold, and she knows that.

We usually interpret the news of one side facing disproportionate retirements that way. But the counterintuitive take is that politicians are absorbing the Ruth Bader Ginsburg lesson not to lose a valuable seat by clinging to it too long. If 2026 is a bad year for Republicans, that makes it a good year for Democrats to face the inevitable risk of replacing an incumbent in an open-seat election. That bet may prove premature — but it seems a likelier interpretation of what Democratic senators are thinking right now. It’s also what should keep Republicans up at night worrying about what Donald Trump’s trade wars are doing to the party’s standing on the economy.